Steemit is remarkable in every sense that we can think of. We are lucky to be part of such a great platform at such an early stage.
As steemit continues to grow, the possibilities of diversification of Steem Powered Platforms have grown with it. With the power of Steem Blockchain, people are now moving their entire social media activities to these platforms.
Why?
Because our time spent on the social media is worth something. It has to be.. the decentralization of censorship is mandatory. The decentralization of data is now obligatory...
With likes of @zappl replacing twitter, @dmania replacing 9gag, @dsound replacing soundcloud and @dtube replacing youtube, there was an urgent need to replace instagram... a photo-sharing social media platform where you can post your photos / videos.
https://steepshot.io is the first photo-sharing steem powered application.
The CEO of Steepshot is @pmartynov A.K.A Pavel Martynov who hails from Minsk, Belarus. He successfully co-founded @steepshot along with his dedicated group of devs.
I am not a big fan of names of steem powered platforms starting with “d”. Though this is my personal opinion but i strongly feel that there is a great appeal to unique names as they attract more people..
To be hoenst had the platform been named dInsta or dGram, you wouldn’t be reading this post right now :p
So coming back to topic, steepshot is the steem powered version of instagram and it is absolutely adorable.
Before I head to the 5 reasons as to why photographer community on steemit should use steepshot, I would like to cover the basics of steepshot that includes signing up/in parts and how to use it.
You can login on steepshot at https://alpha.steepshot.io/
Alternatively you can download their app that is available for both android and apple devices. Please be warned that steepshot iOS app may not be available in certain countries’ App Store.
There is no need to sign up if you already have a steemit account. But if you don’t, you know what to do...
Signing in on steepshot is easy. All you need is your steemit username and Posting Key.. this is important, you cannot sign in by entering your master password or active key. If you dont know what is your posting key, then go to your wallet -> Permissions -> Posting Key-> Show Private Key-> copy the key and use it. See illustration below :-
If you don’t know what are these keys and what are their uses, please follow my guide here that includes everything about permission keys.
After you have successfully signed in steepshot, it will display the main page, which will look something like this :-
This is your feed section and will display steepshot posts of the people you are following. As you can see my good friend @mariannewest has posted a picture there which is on top of my feed. You can scroll down to see other posts.
Creating the post on steepshot is as easy as it goes. Click on the colourful + sign on top of screen as illustrated below :-
It will open a page that will look like this :-
Fill the required information as depicted on page and click on “create new post” button at the bottom.
And there you go... you have successfully posted your first post via steepshot.
Please keep in mind that whatever you post on steepshot will also be displayed on your steemit blog.
There is a growing community on steemit, that prefer to post pictures instead of writing huge text styled blogs. Some of these users are even professional photographers.
Following paragraphs will highlight as to why the community needs to use Steepshot for posting their pictures.
1. Dedicated Feed Section
Steepshot uses dedicated feed section that will not display other blog posts of steemit. Instead it will always show posts created from steepshot. The feed is endless and you can browse through Hot, New and Top sections to maximize your experience of feed..
2. Option of 20 Tags
This is really a neat feature.. we already know that steemit has a provision of using 5 tags at the end of the post to make your post visible in keyword searches people might be looking for. Steepshot takes this feature to another level by giving you the option of using 20 tags per post.
This will help your post show up in more keyword searches thus providing you with more visibility.
3. Steepshot Bot for Telegram
This is a massive feature specially for those iOS users who do not have steepshot app in their country’s App Store. Steepshot has recently developed a bot called steepshotbot that works flawlessly with Telegram.
Telegram is a wildly acclaimed cloud based messenger app. So the idea of the bot for telegram is that if you dont have steepshot app or if you don’t want to use one or the web client of steepshot, then you can configure this bot which will directly post your images to steepshot.
And of course you can comment and curate the steepshot posts from telegram via steepshotBot as well...
4. Extremely user friendly
This may sound like that I am just trying to fill the gaps here but you won’t believe the level of user friendliness this platform has to offer. The GUI is extremely simple and elegant. Navigating through the options is really easy and does not need any further assistance. This is one of those features which will bring in a lot of traffic to this platform.
5. Use of both IPFS and Cloud Storage to Store Your Pictures
This might be a deal breaker for few people who absolutely dislike centralized storages. However those of us who have struggled with decentralized IPFS protocol would understand this step almost immediately. There is never a guarantee that the end user would receive the image at all whilst using IPFS protocol.
This kind of uncertainty can kill the platform in its tracks. Most of the users don’t care what problems IPFS protocol has encountered. All they care about is successful and fast uploading and downloading of data.
So this is a really great step by steepshot to use a hybrid storage technology for their platform and as a user, you will never have to worry about your pictures being invisible or unavailable to other users.
@steepshot is working really hard to improve their platform for mass consumption. In future, they plan on to incorporate short videos to steepshot.io
I know many talented photographers like @gamer00 who are professionals and their blog on steemit is mostly pictorial in nature. I would urge everyone in general and these photographers in particular to try steepshot.
Happy posting
JBN
Kindly consider to upvote, resteem. If you would like to ask anything, please don’t hesitate to post your opinions or questions in the comment section..
Thumbnail image is designed on free tool canva, rest of the images are screenshots taken from my own device
